Cars, Interchanges, Traffic Counters, and some Pretty Darned Good Knot Invariants

70th Topology Symposium, Nara, August 2023.

Abstract. Reporting on joint work with Roland van der Veen, I'll tell you some stories about $\rho_1$, an easy to define, strong, fast to compute, homomorphic, and well-connected knot invariant. $\rho_1$ was first studied by Rozansky and Overbay and by Ohtsuki, it is dominated by the coloured Jones polynomial (but it isn't lesser!), it has far-reaching generalizations, and I wish I understood it.

URL: http://drorbn.net/na23.

Links: AKT ap APAI AQDW DoPeGDO Dogma FDA Ov Scha SolvApp

Handout: Cars.html, Cars.pdf.

After-talk writeup: NaraTalkSummary.pdf.

Talk Video (also at YouTube).

Some pictures from Nara.

Sources: pensieve.